Thursday, February 21, 2008

Deborah Needleman, as you design freaks know, is the editor in chief of Domino. Domino was her brainchild. She was gracious enough to email me to let me know she read all of our comments. More on that in a moment.

When I wrote the open letter to Domino, I seriously had no idea that this blog would see its highest traffic ever and that the posts would generate about 130 comments total. Something hit a nerve with all of you, clearly.

As much as we love our magazines, the challenge is that it's just paper. You can't talk back. Sometimes it seems that publications aren't having the conversation with you that you want them to have. Blogs are the conversation. When it's quiet on the comment front, I can tell that you guys don't give a rats ass about, say, my latest recommendation of The Twilight Singers album. But when a post is good, holy hell, you people respond fast and furiously. The feedback loop is very, very clear.

Deborah's home. My kind of porn. Love it. Photo from NY Mag.

I wasn't sure if Domino was getting the feedback. (How can we ever be sure? The don't even publish reader letters.) Lucky for us, they were listening.

Here's the good news.... as one reader commented, "We're all saying the same thing... and that's reassuring. The magazine's diagnosis is pretty clear."

And luckily, the diagnosis merely calls for baby aspirin, not major surgery. The comments focused on about 4 things people would like to see removed from the magazine or tweaked. But overwhelmingly, what I heard was that most people still love Domino. They just want more of what made us love it in the first place.

I am going to exchange a few emails with Deborah with some burning questions and hopefully, she will be comfortable having me post some of her thoughts here soon. Generally, though, there isn't much more I can say that you all haven't already said. Your comments and suggestions were great; some very funny, some just fiesty, all very entertaining to read, so I thank you for taking time to post them.

22 comments:

I hope that Domino recognizes the truthfulness and sincerity of the comments and suggestions. You could NOT pay a focus group and get this level of passionate interest. I really believe ALL traditional media (ie. magazines conceived 4-6 months before you read them) have to re-evaluate themselves against The Blogs who rely on authenticity and immediacy to ensure readership interest (There's no one quite like Decorno out there, and she's ALWAYS herself. We love that about her. In fact, that is why we all felt so comfortable being ourselves.) Congratulations Decorno. Well done. And you thought there was no fun to be had in Newark NJ.

Ha! Maison, too funny. Well, considering how THAT publication is the true scourge of all decorno rags, you are right - - I should have written my "open letter" to AD.

But some things are just too far gone to be saved, Architectural Digest being one of them. What is up with AD anyway? One page is Mario Buatta vomiting chintz ALL over a townhouse and the next page it's dour Jennifer Post standing in the middle of a white box in which she proudly proclaims that in order to work with her she insisted her clients eliminate all their personal effects. No photos, no books. NOTHING.

While you have her ear. You might mention that the search feature on the domino website has disapeared sometime over the last 4 months. I miss the tool. The name and suggestion to join/visit the domino flickr group also used to be stated at the end of the gallery offerings. Both have been missed by me and I did email this to them a while back. Thanks.

Not true. Magazines run Websites to get advertising--Web advertising. It's in their interests to keep Web surfers sticking around for as long as possible (increasing the surfers' exposure to the ads), so even from a crass business perspective, a search function is a necessity. Publishers want to say to advertisers: "Look, our Web visitors stay an average of seven minutes, compared with only 10 seconds for Blueprint's Web visitors."

"One page is Mario Buatta vomiting chintz ALL over a townhouse and the next page it's dour Jennifer Post standing in the middle of a white box in which she proudly proclaims that in order to work with her she insisted her clients eliminate all their personal effects. No photos, no books. NOTHING."

I squealed when I read this. A) because I fully 100% agree, and B) because Buatta and Post are my very own personal ABSOLUTE least favorites of all the less-than-inspiring designers whose work gets featured in AD.

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